That's still the case today, just as it was in 1968 when I was 18 years old and working for a tree company in my suburban hometown outside New York City.

The police station was on the main drag in the heart of downtown. My great-uncle Tom (my mother's father's brother-in-law) had been a policeman in town during Prohibition and in 1968 was the security guard at the granite bank that sat at one end of the street. At the other end of the block, maybe a quarter of a mile away, was a little candy store owned by a Holocaust survivor with a faded number tattooed on his arm. He opened early and sold newspapers and cigarettes to the blue collar workers who walked around the corner to the diner where they ate breakfast and lunch.

Everybody knew everybody, and my father was right in the middle of everything. His step-father was the chief of the fire department; his DAR mother had been Town Clerk since World War II. As a kid, nothing bored me more than having to visit my father's parents and listen to their endless stream of gossip: how the mayor was having an affair with the wife of the Lutheran minister; how the math teacher caught his wife with the funeral director and murdered her, and then their kids; how the accident that killed my friend's mother wasn't an accident at all. The sordid sort of thing that makes insiders feel powerful.

It was impossible to escape the scrutiny. The company I worked for had the contract for all the tree work in town. In those days Dutch elm disease was rampant, and we did a lot of big takedowns that required a few extra hands.